Colorada Sensibly Legalizes Marijuana

I think we should legalize marijuana across the board, and tax it heavily. I do not favor using it, but I think it is not worse than alcohol, and should be treated the same way.

I commend Colorado for legalizing the recreational use of marijuana.  I believe this will be the wave of the future.

This is some sensible news to start the new year.

Chinese Democracy is Coming

Two of the happiest developments to end 2013 with was the announcement by the Chinese government that they will end their brutal labor camps, and ease their 'one-child' policy.

I think democracy will come to China as their middle class grows.

They will need a major cultural change to reduce corruption from within.  My hopes are on the evangelical Christian revival that I think will come when they have religious freedom.

Chinese democracy will be a great step forward for the whole world.

It will not come in 2014, but soon.

The Rational Search for That Which Transcends the Rational

I was reading Kelly Besecke's You Can't Put God in a Box, a study of intellectuals seeking a transcendent religion they can believe in beyond the narrow fundamentalisms of existing religions.  They start from a belief that there is a transcendent beyond what any language can adequately say.

I believe this is true.  Thinking about this search for the transcendent clarified something for me.

You can't explain rationally what the transcendent is. However, you can explain rationally why you can't explain rationally what the transcendent is.

The limits of language are rationally discernable.  This helps us be both open minded and humble in describing what is beyond language.

Hurrah for Political Compromise in the Congress

I find it very encouraging that Republican leaders are making a budget with Democrats.

I particularly am delighted that Speaker Boehner has finally attempted to take back his party from their dangerous coalition partners, the Tea Partiers.

This bodes well for actual government.

Caring Ingeniously

In the "Happy Society" class we were talking about Julian Simon's idea that human ingenuity is the greatest resource, the reason we can have confidence in humanity's ability to solve or ameliorate its problems.

One woman, who will in a few years be a fine and caring doctor, was encouraged by the idea of human ingenuity as a great source of hope for humanity in general.  This led me ask her, and wonder myself, how this idea applied to people like her.

The question I asked her was:  "What do you think will be the best way to focus your own ingenuity? People who want to care for and serve others – most of whom are women – tend to think of how they can care well, but not how they can care ingeniously."

Health Care Navigator Suppression Laws are Just Evil

Thirteen states have passed laws making it extremely difficult, or even illegal, to help uninsured people navigate the new health insurance exchanges.

For example, in Texas, "navigators must have 40 hours of state training in addition to the 20 hours the health care law requires. Republican Gov. Rick Perry 'is even trying to limit the hours of navigator operations from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., which is an extraordinary restriction for ordinary folks who are working for a living who want to buy insurance and get benefits'".

I understand that Republicans and Tea Partiers want to deprive Pres. Obama of major legislative achievement.  They fought tooth and nail when the act was being passed.  They shut down the whole government, at huge expense, to try to prevent Obamacare from starting - to no effect.

But to prevent the good work of helping people get health insurance out of sheer partisanship is very, very wrong.

The Iran Deal is a Good First Step

Today's good news:  we made a preliminary agreement with Iran.  They will cap their nuclear weapons program, and we will ease some of the economic sanctions.  For a time.  And then we will assess if each side held up its end.

This is exactly how diplomacy is supposed to work.

One of the most puzzling fights in the 2008 presidential election was over talking to Iran.  Sen. Obama said he was willing to sit down and talk to the Iranians to see if we could work out a deal. 

Amazingly, he was attacked by some hard-rightist.  They said we should only talk to Iran if they had already met all of our demands.  That is the kind of foolishness that guarantees war and misery, and puts the United States in the wrong from the outset.  That is the position of the Athenians in the Melian dialogue - the very model of big-power injustice.

The new Iranian deal shows the wisdom of now-President Obama's approach.

Filibuster Reform: A Centrist View

The filibuster rules were changed in the U.S. Senate yesterday to end the egregious obstructions by the minority.  I am glad that executive appointments can now be voted on, and that some governing will actually happen.

However, I think this is the wrong solution to the wrong problem.

The real problem occurred when the meaning of 'filibuster' was changed.  A real filibuster involves standing up and talking about why you oppose a nominee or bill.  You may be standing and talking for a long time.  You have to hold up all other Senate business to carry on with your filibuster.  This means that you need quite a bit of support from the other senators, or you will lose a cloture vote.

A few years ago, in a foolish bipartisan measure, the Senate rules were changed to allow the mere threat of a filibuster to be enough to block a nomination or a bill.  This is the mistake that should be corrected. 

If the current relatively minor rule change is the 'nuclear option,' then the previous rule change was the tsunami that washed away all meaning to the filibuster rule.

Let's go back to real filibusters if you want to stop the Senate.

The Ubiquity of Fear Campaigns

"Fear campaigns are used extensively in today's society.  An entire commercial break without at least one fear campaign is a rare occasion."

I asked students in my "Happy Society" class to analyze fear campaigns.  They did not lack for material.  I have read papers analyzing campaigns against drinking, meth, global warming, domestic violence, obesity, several medical conditions, and many more.  If this had been an election year in Kentucky, I imagine I would also have seen an abundance of political ads.

I also asked them to imagine making the same argument, but in a positive way.  In some cases it was easy, but in many it was hard.

Advertisers use fear even more than they use sex to sell everything.  This fosters a culture of fear that undermines social trust, and therefore undermines general happiness.

After viewing many fear campaigns, one student reached to conclusion quoted above.

Which leads to a good natural experiment.  The next time you watch television, pay attention to a few commercial breaks. See how often a whole commercial break goes by without at least one fear ad.

The Surprising Thing I Learned About My Students' Image of 9/11

I am teaching a short course on 9/11. 

I wanted to teach this course when I realized that next year's first-year students were in kindergarten in 2001.  Soon the Centre student body will have no memory of the 9/11 attack, while the grownups around them will continue to refer to the events as if they happened yesterday.

The juniors and seniors I am teaching this term were in third or fourth grade at the time. They do remember, though mostly they remember the commotion among the adults and in their school.  But they all saw the pictures of the burning towers of the World Trade Center that day.

The surprising thing I learned from teaching them is that they did not know that the twin towers were a famous landmark before 9/11.  They asked me if, when we heard that the World Trade Center had been hit by airplanes, could most people picture what those buildings looked like?

For young adults today - and likely the whole next generation - their main image of the World Trade Center is of the twin towers on fire, and then collapsing into rubble.

Obamacare Will Be A Pretty Big Success

I think the extension of health insurance to all Americans is a huge step forward. It will soon become as much a part of the fabric of American life as Social Security and Medicare.  It will be hard to convince students in a few years that there was a time when we did not have universal health insurance.

It will also be hard to convince students, especially the Republican students, that Republican legislators all voted against universal health insurance.  That the Republican Party ran three elections on trying to defeat and then overturn what they called Obamacare.  The Tea Party is opposed to the Affordable Care Act beyond the point of reason sometimes.  They shut down the government and were ready to bankrupt the country rather than let the uninsured have health insurance.

The Republican alliance with the Tea Party will, I think, be seen as a disastrous miscalculation, especially about Obamacare.

The Republican Party is strenuously, even frantically, opposed to Obamacare because they know it will be a success.

M23 Rebels Lay Down Arms, Agree to Talk in Congo

"The rebels agree to lay down their arms and negotiate ..." is almost always good news. 

In today's good news, the M23 rebel group in Congo were the ones stopping their war.  The government of the Congo will negotiate to achieve the rebels' reintegration into society. 

The Congolese government was backed by UN troops who, unusually, were sent there to fight.  The rebels' main outside supporters, the government of Rwanda, also accepted the peace deal.

This is not the end of fighting in the eastern Congo - several other rebel groups and gangs remain.  But today's good news sets an excellent precedent for creating lawful order in one of the most lawless places on earth.

We Dwell on Wars that Settle Ethical Conflicts

I attended a fruitful symposium at Maryville College on the moral meaning of the Civil War.

The best idea I had while taking part in this discussion is that the wars we dwell on - the Civil War, the Second World War, the American Revolution, the French Revolution - settled deeply vexing ethical issues. 

Equally big wars that did not settle such questions, though, we ignore.  The War of 1812 or the Korean War, for Americans.  The First World War for the world. 

The comparison I thought most about at the conference was between the U.S. Civil War and the 30 Years War.  This conference emphasized the moral and theological problem that slavery posed for both sides in the Civil War, a problem that could not be settled by the usual theological means.  The 30 Years War, likewise, grew out of a very deep theological problem that could not be settled by theological means. 

But the 30 Years War ended in military stalemate and ideological exhaustion.  The theological conflict was not settled - instead, the Enlightenment thinkers concluded that religious issues simply had to be removed from politics.

The Civil War, by contrast, settled the ethical problem of slavery when the churches and the parties could not.  That war did not settle the problem of racism, which got worse in the post-war era before it got better.  But the Civil War ended the question of slavery, just as World War II ended the question of fascism.

No war is good, but the wars we dwell on did a good thing in settling an ethical conflict too deep to be handled any other way.

Ending the Shutdown: The Reluctant Center Prevails

I am hopeful that the current cooperation between Republican and Democratic leaders in the U.S. Senate will end the government shutdown, and remove the threat of a debt default.

Even more importantly, the leaders of both parties, especially the Republican, have been obliged to act like centrists, even if they do not want to. Actually, I think most Republican and Democratic leaders, year in and year out, do want to cooperate with one another. 

For the past few years the Republicans have been bowing to their coalition partners, the Tea Party.  The Tea Party does not wish to cooperate, as they have made clear from day one. Yet the coalition of the two rightist parties was doomed from the beginning. A governing party and an anti-government party can not, by their very natures, work together to govern. 

The Republican Party made a Faustian bargain with a disorganized mass of anti-government social movements, going back to the Reagan Administration. This worked for them through most of the Reagan and Bush, Sr. years, because once in office the Republicans ignored their anti-government wing. They cooperated with the Democrats in making the government larger.

This strategy has come back to bite them, though.  All those years under the wing of the Republican Party taught the disparate anti-government types how to function as a loose party.  In the last three cycles, the Tea Party has emerged as the more effective part of the 'conservative' coalition. The minority Republican Party was forced to make a coalition with the Tea Party to gain shaky control of the House of Representatives.

I think now, having brought the credit of the United States to the brink of collapse, the Republican Party is finally starting to cut their ungovernable progeny loose.

Which is good for centrism, and for responsible government.

Juan Linz: An Appreciation

My dissertation director, Juan Linz, died recently. He was 86, and had been retired for some years.

Linz was a German-born Spaniard who spent his whole career in the U.S., mostly at Yale. He was a political sociologist, propagator of the idea of 'authoritarian' regimes, an expert on the Basque terrorists, and a major theorist of democratic regimes.  His recent work on gridlock and worse in presidential democracies is being much cited just now.

He turned out to be an odd choice as dissertation director.  He was a European and a Catholic (though he was careful never to let students see his faith).  My dissertation was about American Presbyterians.  I often thought that he secretly believed that America and Protestantism were novelties that it was too soon to get too involved with. 

His students will long tell stories of the two large Gladstone bags of books that he always carried with him, and his chain smoking of strong Spanish "Ducados" cigarettes.

I worked with him because he was a Weberian, and had thought a great deal about religion and politics.  I learned a great deal from him on those subjects.

Obscenity and Pornography

This one goes a bit into the weeds.  I apologize for its length.

Yesterday we at Centre had a talk by a visiting philosopher on obscenity law.  My "Happy Society" class went because we have been studying Haidt's Righteous Minds, which talks about the different moral foundations that liberals and conservatives appeal to.  When I read the poster describing Michael Kessler's approach, I knew he was a liberal.  His argument was that an individual's choice to use obscene material hurts no one, so there should be no law against it. A conservative, by contrast, would argue that pornography - the specific example of obscenity that Kessler was concerned with - degrades the sanctity of the body, both of individuals and of the body politic.

To make his argument, Kessler used three arguments:

1) Mill says I am the sovereign over myself, as long as I do no harm to others.

2) The Rowan decision said that householders could opt out of receiving obscene material in the mail.

3) the Miller decision said that community standards could prohibit sending obscene material in the mail to anyone in the community.

Kessler read this sequence this way:
Mill was right - individuals are sovereign over what they do, as long as it does not harm other individuals.

Rowan was right - individuals can exercise their sovereign individuality by choosing not to receive obscene material.

Miller was wrong - the state is imposing a universal judgment that obscene material is not open to the free choice of individuals.

I think this reading is wrong.

Mill is talking about individuals.  I think in practice the range of things that apply only to individuals, without affecting the other people that individual is connected to, is very small.

Rowan is not about individuals, it is about households. The responsible adults of a household decide to protect their little community from the intrusion of obscene material.

Miller is not about the state, and certainly not about the state making a universal substantive judgment.  The community is a larger version of the household that was acting in Rowan.  This large household is making a similar decision to protect their somewhat larger community from the intrusion of obscene material.

Kessler objected to any community standards on the grounds that they might be used to support racism.

But here is the problem.  Liberals use community standards the same as everyone else.  They decide in the little community of their household, or in the somewhat larger community of the social networks they control, such as campuses, that some obscene material is not permitted. For example, they forbid the use of racist words.

Banning the 'n-word' is a community standard.

I think Kessler was confused about obscenity and pornography.  He was drawing a distinction, but the wrong one.  What makes anything obscene is its public quality.  The debate over obscenity is over whether things which are not, or cannot be, forbidden in private must also be accepted in public. Rowan drew the public/private line at the household mailbox.  Miller, more ambitiously, drew the line at the community's border.  Pornography is just one example of the vastly broader category of obscenity.

The other thing at issue in Rowan and Miller is whether pornography is an inherently dangerous substance. Some things are banned even in private because they are too dangerous to the community to be in private hands.  Nuclear weapons would be an uncontroversial example.

Pornography is a somewhat dangerous substance.  I think porn is about as dangerous as marijuana.  They both do dull the moral sense.  But neither is very dangerous.  Therefore, I think they should be regulated the same way.  Not forbidden in private, but strongly discouraged in public.  In other words, obscene - off stage.

Disney Does a Happy Thing: Upgrading Their Part-Time Employees

Disney has decided to make its 30-hour-per-week employees full-timers, so they can get health insurance.  This is a happy outcome, brought about by the Affordable Care Act.

Disney's action is in contrast to the shameful decision by some employers - notably Kentucky-based Papa John's Pizza - to downgrade its nearly full-time employees to part time so that they would not get health benefits.

I believe as universal health insurance becomes the norm in the United States, more companies will follow Disney's lead.

Why Were the Fifty-Somethings the Least Likely to Leave Religion?

The Pew Religion and Public Life project hosted an excellent discussion of what the increase in religious 'nones' (people who profess no religion) means.  One of the tables presented plotted the increase by age from 2008 to 2012.

The main point is that the young are more likely to now say they have no religion than are the old.

What struck me most, though, was the trough right in the middle of this chart: people in their early 50s were the least likely to say they had become less connected to a religious institution in that period.

I am drawn to this table because it has a puzzling anomaly that needs explaining.  I am also drawn to this table because I am in my early 50s, and I have had no inclination in this period to leave the church.

I do not have a good explanation.  I do have one hypothesis to offer, and maybe two.

First, this age group is on the cusp between the Baby Boomers and Generation Xers, between inflated rhetoric and 'just do it.' Being able to partly identify each way, perhaps we are willing to give the church, the land of inflated rhetoric, another chance to just do it in making a better world.

Second, this is exactly the age group of President Obama (b. 1961).  The people most likely to say they had no religion are young Democrats. Perhaps Democrats of the president's cohort are less likely to give up on religion when they see him stay with the mainline church that gave his life direction.

Why Do the Petite Bourgeoisie Like Strongmen?

The small business class is famously the most conservative in society.  They are the backbone of anti-democratic movements, and the supporters of dictators.  Even in very democratic societies, they like leaders who act, and regard political negotiation as weakness.

One of the solid findings of happiness research is that we hate loss more than we like an equivalent gain. We continue to be anxious about possible losses, but quickly get used to sizable gains.

I believe the petite bourgeoisie favors the strongman because their own economic position feels perpetually precarious.  They have a little and hate to lose it.  They fear the poor - whom they tend to regard as lazy, dependent, and undeserving - as coming for their stuff.  Democratic politics, which tends to give something to every group of potential voters, is dangerous because it enables and encourages the poor.  Strongmen are better because they don't have to give any group anything.

Once again, fear appears to be the great solvent of a happy, trusting society.

Hurrah for Rand Paul! He Supports Restoring Felons' Voting Rights.

Senator Rand Paul calls for restoring the voting rights of felons with the completion of their sentences.  He also wants to reclassify the lowest kind of felonies to misdemeanors so the convicts would not lose their voting rights in the first place.

I don't often agree with Sen. Paul, but I thoroughly agree with him on this issue.  Kentucky has the most difficult path for felons to get their voting rights restored, so it is particularly helpful to have a Kentucky senator take this strong line.